Cali-Texas and big florida fighting the feds over who gets to be the true Heir of Hitler while the northwest has a Maoist Insurgency lol 
Cali-Texas and big florida fighting the feds over who gets to be the true Heir of Hitler while the northwest has a Maoist Insurgency lol
For the rest of the world, assuming the targets are the former states, the downside is similar to the open air nuclear testing done in the Pacific. There have been over 500 atmospheric nuclear detonations already.
Not that it’s good, but it is comparable and lesser than the global violence of capitalism.
no it isn’t. they specifically did it in the pacific because the consequences are different. a nuclear detonation in a major city is kicking up way more dirt & starting fires. there’s enough kindling in the US to cool the entire planet.
Conventional warfare and firebombing has the same risks. The only unique things about nukes is radiation/fallout and the speed with which you can destroy many large targets at once rather than requiring a larger mobilization.
wow the only thing different from conventional weapons are the characteristics that make them non-conventional 🙄. shockingly its actually very different when hundreds of kilometers of shit go up at once than over months and years
With how fires work it’s really not different. One firebombing is the same as a several nukes in that regard, which is the (condescending) yet misguided point I’m responding to.
i’m not saying nuclear weapons make special magic fire, i’m telling you a big concentrated fire has different effects on the environment than smaller, spread out (geographically or chronologically) ones. because two processes work the same on a micro level does not mean you can conflate them. campfires over a long enough period might produce the same amount of smoke and particulates as a volcanic eruption, but only one of those is blocking out the sun
Firebombing is what makes a big concentrated fire. When Tokyo was firebombed it continued burning for days and had significant impacts on the weather. Same for Dresden.
Nukes actually don’t make a big concentrated fire. The examples we have of them used in cities show that they make a large number of small fires. In [edit: Hiroshima], those fires then merged into much larger ones as they caught on through a very flammable city (mostly wooden structures). The fire risk is lesser than with firebombings, which intentionally use incendiary devices to ensure a given target lights on fire, usually in clusters to ensure the fires are past a critical point to be self-maintaining.
Nukes are not dangerous because they cause fires. They’re dangerous because they leave behind radioactivity and because you can blow up a lot of things at once. This was and is considered a significant tactical advantage, as you can disable “the enemy” in one round, but if they also have nukes they’ll try to do the same, and in the process you’ll destroy so many population centers and possibly leave them uninhabitable for decades depending on the exact kind of bomb used.
you’re being incredibly myopic, this isn’t about comparing the damage to individual cities based on munitions. if we went to the trouble of hand-placing a firebomb in every structure of a city we could ensure 100% damage! that’s the most dangerous form of warfare right there! MIRVs can target 10 cities, there’s hundreds of these missiles. the smoke of 100 cities in the same day causes crop failures and temperature changes, the year (optimistic estimate) it would take to do that with a normal air campaign would limit those effects.
this is why they’re different. if all 500 nuclear tests that have ever been done in 80 years all happened tomorrow, the effects on our climate would be substantially different from the same spaced out over 80 years.
I’m not being myopic, I’m just addressing items as they are presented to me and trying to do them one at a time. I’ll try doing multiple at a time, maybe it will be more constructive.
Consider that firebombing causes far more fire than nukes and that forest fires regularly release far more soot. I’m suggesting that we do think of the scale here, and think about the logic at hand, given that nukes’ primary impact is actually not starting fires or soot production. Both regular forest fires and volcanic activity produces comparable amounts of this already, and firebombing does way more of it. The number of nukes you’re describing would likely produce less cooling materials than Krakatoa.
I haven’t gotten to the topic of nuclear winter yet because I thought the other points might settle it first. But nuclear winter is, itself, very poorly evidenced and depends on speculation that flies in the face of what evidence we do have. It assumes that particulates in the stratosphere would hit some turning point where they stop acting like they usually do, with basically no mechanistic basis. It’s just a speculative and very very simple linear model from the 80s that got turned into pop science and water cooler chat.
Nukes are still horrible, as are all the weapons we’ve mentioned, but nuclear winter is not anywhere near the thing to rationally fear from them.